About Me

I was a reporter and columnist for 40 years for a chain of newspapers in the suburbs of Chicago. I'm a military veteran having served in the United States Army Combat Engineers (Cpl. E-4) and a Korean War veteran with an Honorable Discharge from the Armed Forces of the United States of America

Monday, February 4, 2008

Attacks by the Taliban in Afghanistan surged last year, according to previously unpublished figures from allied military forces fighting insurgents.

Statistics compiled by the multinational International Stabilisation Force in Afghanistan show attacks on international troops and the Afghan government have gone up by between a fifth and a third.

But although admitting the figures show a 'significant rise', Nato insists the geographic extent of the violence remains limited. 'Seventy per cent of the incidents took place in just 10 per cent of the country, where no more than 6 per cent of the population live, and many have been initiated by our forces as we engage with the enemy,' a Nato source said. 'That is the same area as in 2006 which shows the insurgency is not spreading.' Click on link for complete story

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. ("Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.") Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.

"In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad."And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:"The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.'s."

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq."

Note that both pieces started with bombing news -- in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days -- those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad -- simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence. Commentary by Bill Corcoran, editor of this blog: And now you can understand why I have been harping on the fact the mainstream media in the United States has abandoned covering the Iraq war except for what we call in the journalism business a sidebar story.Click on link above to read the rest of this story....

BAGHDAD — The U.S. military said Monday that it had accidentally killed nine Iraqi civilians during an operation targeting al-Qaida in Iraq, the deadliest known case of mistaken identity in recent months.The civilians were killed Saturday near Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of the Baghdad, Navy Lt. Patrick Evans told The Associated Press. Three wounded civilians were taken to U.S. military hospitals nearby, he said.

Evans did not give details about exactly how the people died but said the killings occurred as U.S. forces pursued suspected al-Qaida in Iraq militants. The incident is under investigation, he said.

Iraqi police said the victims, including two women, were in two houses in the village of Tal al-Samar, which was bombed by American warplanes late Saturday. They were all Sunni, an officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media.

The U.S. airstrike occurred after an American convoy came under enemy fire in Tal al-Samar and soldiers called for air support, the Iraqi officer said.

Shortly after the incident, American officers met with a Muslim sheik representing citizens in the area, Evans said.

“We offer our condolences to the families of those who were killed in this incident, and we mourn the loss of innocent civilian life,” he said in a statement e-mailed to the AP.

In an attempt to quell bad feelings between Sunnis and Shi’ites, the Iraq parliament passed a law allowing former Ba’ath Party members to return to the posts they held during the Saddam regime; however, there is a possibility that the law could be overturned during an automatic review process. Separately, a spokesman for the Baghdad security plan held a news conference, where he described the deteriorating infrastructure Baghdad residents suffer through. Otherwise, it was a routine news day with only 31 Iraqis killed and 17 more wounded in recent attacks. Also, two American soldiers were reported killed.